1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet Protocol (IP) based communications; and more particularly to providing IP based communications from a satellite communication system itself, or by a satellite communication system in cooperation with other communication system(s).
2. Related Art
Communication systems are known to support wireless and wire lined communications between wireless and/or wire lined communication devices. Such communication systems range from national and/or international cellular telephone systems to the Internet to point-to-point wireless networks. Each type of communication system is constructed, and hence operates, in accordance with one or more communication standards. For instance, wireless communication systems may operate in accordance with one or more standards including, but not limited to, IEEE 802.11x, Bluetooth, wireless wide area networks (e.g., WiMAX), advanced mobile phone services (AMPS), digital AMPS, global system for mobile communications (GSM), North American code division multiple access (CDMA), Wideband CDMA, local multi-point distribution systems (LMDS), multi-channel-multi-point distribution systems (MMDS), radio frequency identification (RFID), Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), and many others.
Depending on the type of wireless communication system, a wireless communication device, such as a cellular telephone, two-way radio, personal digital assistant (PDA), personal computer (PC), laptop computer, home entertainment equipment, RFID reader, RFID tag, et cetera communicates directly or indirectly with other wireless communication devices. For direct communications (also known as point-to-point communications), the participating wireless communication devices tune their receivers and transmitters to the same channel or channels (e.g., one of the plurality of radio frequency (RF) carriers of the wireless communication system or a particular RF frequency for some systems) and communicate over that channel(s). For indirect wireless communications, each wireless communication device communicates directly with an associated base station (e.g., for cellular services) and/or an associated access point (e.g., for a wireless network) via an assigned channel. To complete a communication connection between the wireless communication devices, the associated base stations and/or associated access points communicate with each other directly, via a system controller, via the public switch telephone network, via the Internet, and/or via some other wide area network.
For each wireless communication device to participate in wireless communications, it includes a built-in radio transceiver (that is, receiver and transmitter) or is coupled to an associated radio transceiver (for example, a station for wireless communication networks, RF modem, et cetera). The receiver is coupled to an antenna and includes a low noise amplifier (LNA), one or more intermediate frequency (IF) stages, a filtering stage, and a data recovery stage. The low noise amplifier receives inbound RF signals via the antenna and amplifies them. The one or more intermediate frequency stages mix the amplified RF signals with one or more local oscillations to convert the amplified RF signal into baseband signals or intermediate frequency signals. The filtering stage filters the baseband signals or the IF signals to attenuate unwanted out-of-band signals to produce filtered signals. The data recovery stage recovers raw data from the filtered signals in accordance with the particular wireless communication standard.
The transmitter includes a data modulation stage, one or more intermediate frequency stages, and a power amplifier. The data modulation stage converts raw data into baseband signals in accordance with a particular wireless communication standard. The one or more intermediate frequency stages mix the baseband signals with one or more local oscillations to produce RF signals. The power amplifier amplifies the RF signals prior to transmission via an antenna.
Many wireless transceivers are able to support multiple communication standards, which may be in the same frequency band or in different frequency bands. For example, a wireless transceiver may support Bluetooth communications for a personal area network and IEEE 802.11 communications for a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). In this example, the IEEE 802.11 communications and the Bluetooth communications may be within the same frequency band (for example, 2.4 GHz for IEEE 802.11b, g, etc.). Alternatively, the IEEE 802.11 communications may be in a different frequency band (for example, 5 GHz) than the Bluetooth communications (for example, 2.4 GHz). For Bluetooth communications and IEEE 802.11b, 802.11g, et cetera, communications are interactive protocols that appear to the user as simultaneous implementation, but is actually a shared serial implementation. As such, while a wireless transceiver supports multiple types of standardized communications, it can only support one type of standardized communication at a time.
A transceiver that supports multiple standards includes multiple RF front-ends (for example, on the receiver side, separate LNA, channel filter, and IF stages for each standard and, on the transmitter side, separate IF stages, power amplifiers, and channels filters for each standard). As such, multiple standard transceivers include multiple separate RF front-ends; one for each standard in a different frequency band, channel utilization scheme (e.g., time division multiple access, frequency division multiple access, code division multiple access, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, et cetera), and/or data modulation scheme (for example, phase shift keying, frequency shift keying, amplitude shift keying, combinations and/or variations thereof). Such multiple transceivers are fixed in that they can typically support standards to which they were designed. The transceiver may also include separate baseband processing modules for each communication standard supported. Thus, as a new standard is released, new hardware may be needed for a wireless communication device to support the newly released standard.
Satellite communication systems are often used to service Internet access as well as servicing multimedia content broadcasts. These systems, as well as other systems, are bandwidth limited and cannot always meet customer demand for high-throughput multimedia content for distribution to an Internet Protocol (IP) based communication network.